by Emme Rollins
“Rebecca, I'm sorry.”
I blinked. “I'd never expected him to say that. “What do you mean?” I asked him.
The thin line of light falling against his cheek and jaw bent supply, a sign of his teeth clenching. “I mean,” he said, “that I've been taking advantage of you. Sexually.”
A tiny snort escaped me, and he shifted. “What's so funny?”
I shook my head. “Nothing,” I said. “I mean, I guess you could say you've been doing that. But it's not like I'm not a willing participant.”
His sharp intake of breath told me that he hadn't been quite sure, and I realized that while he had been preoccupied with keeping his hands off of me, there had been a fear in the back of his mind that I may have been under duress. I needed a job, after all, and he was in a position of power over me.
“I suppose that is true,” he said after a moment. “It's still inappropriate. I was attracted to you the first moment I saw you. I thought the airplane could scratch the itch, and, if you were the right candidate for the job, then there would be no further trouble...” He cleared his throat. “That's obviously not the case.”
My heart was beating faster and faster, adrenaline spiking in my veins. My core was wet and my breasts suddenly felt heavy, anchors weighing me down. The need to touch myself, to touch him, was almost shocking. I clenched my hands tight. “So?” I said.
He sighed. “So now you're an employee. I decided that I would make you Carter's girlfriend because it solved a number of problems for him, and for me. For him, it would give him someone who could look after him, keep him in line while I try to help him launch his career in film. Keep him in line before he falls off the deep end... And I told the rest of the band you were his real girlfriend because it was the perfect incentive to stay away from you. After all, if everyone thinks it's real... and anyone got wind that I was hung up on my brother's girl... that would be disastrous.”
“Would it?” I asked him. “Would it really? The publicity would be great.”
In the dim light, I saw him shake his head. “No. That's just it. The Lonely Kings are always in the news, always on the blogs. We're wild children. That image isn't bad for rock stars, but Carter... he needs something to challenge him. He's never been challenged by his guitar, or by his songs and writing ability. I thought if I could get him an acting gig he might stabilize. But the sorts of roles he's up for, in teen flicks with vampires and fairies and werewolves and things, he needs to be healthier. More wholesome. No one is going to want to let their teenage girl go to a movie starring Carter Hudson, the Red Carpet Shitter.”
I gasped. “Did he?” I'd seen the piss photos and Kent was right. Carter needed to shape up his image if he wanted to get into the kinds of films that would make him a star.
Kent shook his head. “No,” he said, sounding almost rueful, “but the fact that you just had to ask me that shows how far I have to go to rehabilitate him.”
This was tough and I wasn't quite sure how to put it delicately. “Does... does Carter want to be rehabilitated?” I asked.
He was silent for a long moment. “I don't know,” he said finally. “I know he's having problems. I can't get him to tell me about them, though. And he drinks and parties to make those problems go away, but they keep getting worse and worse and worse...”
Kent trailed off. In the dimness, I could see his whole body tensing up, curling in on itself. It had been a long night, and it was going to be a long day tomorrow. He was tired. Any idiot could see that. He'd been dragging the band into stardom with his own two hands for years now, and he was probably ready to drop.
Weirdly, I felt sorry for him. Not for the riches or the fame or any of that other stuff, but for the poverty of his life away from it. He was a workaholic, and his work included trying to wrangle three unruly children who had the freedom of adults. He was strong. I'd seen his will at work. I'd seen how good he was at not giving a fuck to get a job done. But that sort of thing can take a toll on a man. No wonder he gravitated to me. I didn't know why he thought I was attractive, but attraction is a weird thing. If he got his tension out with sex, then he was probably working his way through a couple of years of backlog.
I dropped the sheet.
Immediately Kent stiffened in his seat. “We shouldn't...” he said.
I shook my head. “We don't have to touch to have a nice time,” I told him. “The more the merrier, right?”
I saw his eyes glitter in the light of the streetlamp. “Maybe.”
My hands trembled. I'd never been so audacious before, but Kent got under my skin. Slowly I peeled the sheets away from my naked body and heard his sharp intake of breath in the stillness. Licking my lips, I parted my legs and let my shaking hands wander down my body, over my belly, through the soft thatch of pubic hair on my mound, and down into my core lips.
I was wet, slick and hot, like a jungle. Kent's breath picked up as I slowly dragged moisture over my hard little clit, my other hand wandering up to play with one nipple. I gave it a pinch and I squeaked, my hips twisting and jerking at the sensation, and then I began to play with myself in earnest.
“Christ,” Kent muttered, and from the corner of my eye I saw him move. I turned to see him reaching into the slit at the front of his pj bottoms, and in the dark of the room he pulled out his enormous cock.
God, he was huge. I knew it from our airplane encounter, but now I could fully appreciate it, standing tall and proud and heavy in the soft light streaming in through the window. I spread myself with my fingers and began to give my clit the quick, tight circles I knew would bring me to climax in a few minutes.
Kent's long-fingered hand began to stroke his cock.
Make that less than a minute.
Our breathing began to match up, pulsing in time with our frantic ministrations. My core tightened as I watched Kent stroke his shaft, and his glittering eyes raked over my naked body. I twisted and turned, my feet finding the mattress and pushing up into my hand. I bit my lip, tiny moans escaping from my throat as I fondled my breasts.
“Jesus, Rebecca,” Kent said. “Jesus, Jesus...”
I forced myself to turn and watch him as his hips started thrusting into his fist. Beneath the thin white cotton of his undershirt his perfectly sculpted abs contracted and relaxed as he fell into the rhythm of pleasure. Gleaming beads of precum escaped his cock, making the soft head gleam in the dimness as he swirled his palm over the glans. I wondered if it tasted as good as it looked—dark and sweet and thick.
The sad thought—that this might be the last time we could do something like this together—flashed in and out of my mind like lightning. It was weird. I didn't know Kent. It was all hormones and stress and desperation between us, a way to relieve pressure, but I couldn't help but think that there could have been something more there. At the very least, the sex would have been molten hot. I wanted it badly. So, so badly.
But I couldn't. He was right. We had jobs to do, we were now boss and employee, and now he sat across the room, a thousand miles away, stroking his cock and watching me play with my cunt, feeling each other only in our imaginations.
How big would he be in me? Would he touch all the secret parts, the sweet, soft places that ached for him? Would he be quick, or take his time? Would his hips twist, would he grind against my clit, would the bulbous head of his cock pull and plunge in completely, or would he move in tight, quick thrusts? Would he, could he, what would his body feel like, all whip-cord muscles and rough, calloused fingers, teeth and tongue and hard and thick and oh—
My orgasm came suddenly, swiftly, wrapping around me like a vise, and I arched hard into my hand. My palm flattened against my mound of its own accord, rubbing and sliding, almost frictionless with the slick juices of my core, and the tiny, strangled sound that escaped my throat reached across the room and jerked Kent over the edge with me.
“Shit—!” It came out as a hiss, a hard, sharp thing, cutting through me like a knife, and I turned my head just in time to see white spurts of cu
m leap out of his cock. They flew through the air, up across his granite-hard abdomen, spattering over the wifebeater he wore, and his head was thrown back with release. The column of his throat bulged with his Adam's apple, and the low moan he made reverberated through the entire room, quivering and dancing over my skin.
The pleasure receded, leaving me exhausted and limp upon the bed. In his armchair, Kent sagged, clearly just as spent, but as our breathing slowed down our mutual knowledge that this was now over crept in, crowding out the aftershocks. I didn't know what to say. Thanks for the laughs?
Finally he stood up, readjusting his clothing until he was mostly-presentable. I sat up and reached down the bed, pulling the covers around me. I wanted him to kiss me for some reason, but he didn't. He just stared at me for a long moment, his face unreadable in the dark.
“Good night, Rebecca,” he said at last. “I'll see you in the morning. Get some sleep, it's going to be a fight.”
I swallowed and nodded. “Yeah. Okay. Good night.”
He left.
I didn't sleep at all.
Chapter Eight
I'm going to kill him.
The thought floated across my brain, sweet and serene, and it wasn't the first time it had happened today. One month after getting hired to babysit Carter Hudson and I was starting to have homicidal ideations. I tried to push the thought away as soon as it came to me, but it was kind of hard when Carter was sitting right next to me with a shit-eating grin on his face and taking nips from a bottle beneath the table.
We were sitting at one of LAs nicer sushi restaurants, and while I appreciated a good volcano roll, Carter was trying my patience.
He turned again and took a nip of the bottle and I finally figured out what kind of bottle it was.
“Is that... are you drinking cough syrup?” I hissed behind my menu.
Slipping the bottle back under the table, he turned and grinned at me. “Sizzurp, Mrs. Girlfriend. I am drinking sizzurp. You need to get the lingo right.”
“You need to stop drinking cough syrup!” I was trying to keep my voice down but it was hard when all I could think about was grabbing my chopsticks and stabbing them into his eyes.
This was par for the course with Carter. Get him out, doing something nice and normal and not full of drugs or drinking, and his first reaction was to undermine it. It had been going on for a month and I was starting to see why my own mother had gone considerably grayer during our teenage years.
“Sizzurp,” he corrected. “I need to stop drinking sizzurp.” Carter gave me a lazy smile.
I'm going to kill him, I thought again.
Sizzurp. That was cough syrup with codeine, right? Wasn't there some rapper who'd been sipping the sizzurp recently and ended up in the hospital with seizures? That was no bueno. No bueno at all.
I snapped my menu down and pretended to peruse it, but I watched Carter from the corner of my eye. Codeine. That meant he'd be getting a little lazy. Any second now...
The moment he reached for his glass of water, my hand darted under the table and snatched the bottle out of his hand.
“Hey!”
“Shut up,” I said. “The last thing I need is for you to end up in the hospital.”
He slumped in his chair and glowered at me. I knew someone was probably taking pictures of us right now and they'd go running to the tabloids telling the world that we were having lover's problems. Well good. I hoped they did. Maybe the death threats would stop.
Not real death threats, but you know. The crazy fangirl death threats that certain people seemed to think were appropriate to post on the internet. I'd had to shut my Facebook down the second day the news was out that Carter Hudson had a girlfriend, and my email was still getting spammed by girls who hated me for getting between them and their precious Carter. Ha! If only they knew. Being Carter's girlfriend was the worst job I had ever had. I pride myself on sticking to jobs as long as I can, but right now I was thinking of quitting. Killing Carter counted as quitting, right?
I stuffed the cough syrup into my purse and made a mental note to figure out where he had gotten it. I mean... come on. I was with him practically twenty four-seven, and still he managed to somehow undermine my every attempt to help him. Shape up! I wanted to scream, but even though he irritated me to no end, I knew it wouldn't do any good. I couldn't yell at him for the same reason I couldn't yell at a toddler. He honestly just didn't seem to know any better.
The waitress came by and took our orders, and within a minute there was food sitting in front of us. That, at least, was a perk of babysitting a celebrity. No one ignored me now.
Then Carter reached out and plucked a piece of sushi from the plate with his fingers and popped it into his mouth.
Oh. My. God.
“Were you born in a barn?” I hissed.
“You mean like Jesus?” he asked.
Kill. Kill. Kill.
“You're not Jesus. And you'd better not say you're bigger than Jesus.”
Carter laughed. “Well duh,” he said. “I don't want to get shot.”
“Just eat,” I told him.
But he had that sly little grin on his face again, and I knew he was going to do something that I was going to regret.
Picking up another piece of sushi in his fingers, he held it out to me. “Now sweetie,” he said, “would you like a piece?”
I clenched my teeth but managed a smile. I should be the one getting acting roles. “Of course, darling.”
Dutifully I opened my mouth and he placed the roll on my tongue. I pulled back and closed my lips around it.
“Aww,” he said. “Not even a little finger-suck for the paparazzi?” Sucking fingers was his new thing he kept trying to get me to do. He said it was sexy and that a real girlfriend would be all over his guitarist fingers.
Ugh. Ugh, ugh, ugh. “Nope,” I said. “One make-out session a week is the agreement, remember?”
“A little tongue on my fingers doesn't count.” His grin was huge and his eyes twinkled at me. He loved to tease me like this, acting as if I were just like every other girl who wanted to get into his pants. Judging by how many girls I'd found out he'd been with in the past year since their first album shot up the charts, he was a walking STD. That wasn't sexy. Neither was his teasing. He was like a little brother, and just like a little brother I wanted to tattle on him to dad so badly.
“Stop trying to get me to suck on your fingers or I'll tell Kent,” I said.
“God, you are no fun,” Carter said. He pulled a face and grabbed another piece of sushi, the largest of the bunch, and shoving it into his mouth. I hoped he choked on it, and then felt bad.
Sullenly I wielded my chopsticks at our motley assortment of dead fish and in short order we had demolished the whole array.
“I'm still hungry,” Carter said as he swallowed the last piece of sushi.
“We're going to be late for rehearsal. Sweetie.”
“Right. Of course. Darling.”
Carter was going to make a good actor, I could tell, because while he smiled at me and kept his voice loving, his eyes broadcasted murder.
Made two of us.
I paid the bill with the credit card Kent had given me—Carter was no longer allowed to have unlimited access to his bank account, and he also had no car and no license. Kent had locked his license away somewhere and I had the only keys to the car. Carter had tried seducing them out of me, but it had been a no go. It almost seemed like I was the first woman he'd never been able to manipulate into giving him whatever he wanted.
And while I had to admit the measures Kent had taken seemed like they were what was needed, I could tell they weren't working. All they did was make Carter chafe even further, and he acted out in ways that were quite frankly dangerous. Sipping sizzurp was definitely not a healthy response to being forced to get up at a decent hour and eating more than a Bloody Mary for breakfast.
I sighed as I signed a large tip to our waitress, and Carter and I both stood. He helped
me out of my chair, and I gave him a dazzling smile for the cameras, but the tension underneath our interaction was palpable.
Holding hands, we left the restaurant and got into the car, helpfully brought to us by a valet. The moment we were inside it, behind the safety of the tinted windows, Carter's smiling facade dropped.
“This is driving me crazy, Rebecca,” he said. He said the same thing every day, sometimes more than once, and like always I had no idea what to tell him.
“Kent calls the shots,” I said. “That's all I can tell you.”
Carter made a frustrated noise and threw himself back into the car seat and crossed his arms, fuming. I felt bad for him. I really did. In between fantasies of killing him, that is.
Something was going to have to give, soon, and I hoped it wasn't me. I'd barely earned two paychecks—incredible, jaw-dropping paychecks—but like Mom always said, no job was worth your health.
I should call her, I thought. Since my explosion across the LA music scene I'd spoken with her several times—after she got the full update from Rose, of course—and her only reaction was to compliment the new hair color Kent had forced me to get: a rich chestnut brown in lieu of my previous purple and blonde. I didn't want to complain to her about my new job, but her advice would have been invaluable.
Thinking about Mom made me think about home, and thinking about home made me homesick. Absently I gunned the car through LA traffic. It wasn't as nice as Kent's car, but it had enough torque for me to drive like an asshole to let off some steam. Try to cut me off? Take this, shithead.
We arrived at the rehearsal studio in fine form, which meant on time, in one piece, and mostly sober. It was happening more and more lately and the progress should have felt good, but given how miserable Carter clearly was, the victory was hollow.
We entered the rehearsal room to find Kent and Manny already there. For a pothead, Manny was surprisingly punctual. Kent, for his part, seemed to spend all his spare time at the studio practicing, so his presence wasn't a surprise. Sonya hadn't arrived yet, which was also not a surprise—since Carter had been forcefully pried out of his wild-child role, she had happily taken up the mantel, skipping around LA with her entourage in a state of perpetual tipsiness. She was usually late.